Tianjin TEDA Cable Chooses TANDBERG Television for VOD and nPVR Roll-out

Market leading open software platform will provide choice and flexibility for enhanced cable TV services

BEIJING, PRC — TANDBERG Television, part of the Ericsson Group (NASDAQ:ERIC), today announced that its OpenStream® Digital Services Platform has been selected by Tianjin TEDA Cable TV Network Co. (Tianjin TEDA Cable) to expand its cable TV offering into video-on-demand (VOD) and network personal video recorder (nPVR) services. Tianjin TEDA Cable already provides digital cable TV services to the people of Tianjin TEDA (Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area) using a TANDBERG Television head-end and network control solution. Now the operator is rolling out a state-of-the-art VOD system, based on TANDBERG Television’s market leading OpenStream Digital Services Platform with real-time ingest for nPVR. As part of the contract, TANDBERG Television has also provided its Xport® on-demand content production software system. The deal extends TANDBERG Television’s presence in China and confirms the company’s market leadership in open systems VOD platforms.

Tianjin TEDA Cable is a state-owned organization responsible for the planning, construction, operation, and management of the cable TV network of Tianjin TEDA. Tianjin TEDA is a hot-bed of hi-tech industry in China, situated in the northeastern part of China adjacent to Beijing (120km) and the Hebei province. Tianjin TEDA aims to be ‘Asia’s biggest, and China’s best modern industrial area in the 21st century’ and is therefore building a world class communications infrastructure which includes advanced television and broadband services.

‘As we strive to build China’s most modern industrial area, we are keen to provide residents with an advanced digital communications and entertainment environment. Our launch of on-demand television services is a critical next step in this mission,’ says Jia xiaolei, Vice General Manager of Tianjin TEDA Cable. ‘To achieve our goals, we needed a platform that was flexible and scalable and that had been proven in multiple deployments. The open architecture and market leadership of TANDBERG Television’s OpenStream provides a reliable and forward looking solution that will enable us to launch innovative on-demand services today and to grow those services in the future.’

‘We are extremely proud that our OpenStream platform is helping to bring on-demand television services to China and to the people of Tianjin TEDA,’ says Geng Liang, General Manager of TANDBERG Television China. ‘It was vital that we could provide Tianjin TEDA Cable with a cost-effective method of rolling out revenue generating on-demand services. OpenStream allows flexibility, scalability and the lowest possible total cost of ownership without sacrificing performance, security or freedom of choice.’

The industry’s leading open standards based solution, OpenStream seamlessly integrates with third party products and offers Tianjin TEDA Cable the flexibility of using servers, applications, billing systems, and other system components from suppliers of its choice. The TANDBERG real-time ingest (RTI) system is an extension of OpenStream and enables Tianjin TEDA Cable to provide advanced time-shifted television services without having to install expensive hard-drive based set-top boxes (STBs) or PVRs in its customers’ homes. The real-time ingest and catalog solution includes enhancements to TANDBERG’s Xport® Producer encoding and OpenStream platform, which enable Tianjin TEDA Cable to deploy nPVR services simply and quickly and to offer broadcast programs as VOD titles within seconds from the start of broadcast.